Direct mobile communications (DMC) and cellular controlled device to device (D2D) communications are expected to play a significant role in next generation wireless networks. User equipment (UE) cooperation based on D2D communications is one technology that is receiving attention. With advances in D2D communications, UE cooperation is expected to play a role in the future of wireless communications. This technology can be used to provide diversity in space, time and frequency, and increase the robustness against fading and interference. In UE cooperation, the D2D communications are used to establish joint UE reception, where some of the UEs act as relays for other UEs to improve system throughput and coverage. However, joint UE reception using D2D communications can also increase the complexity of the network communications, such as for hybrid-automatic repeat request (HARQ) signaling. The HARQ mechanism is a link adaptation technique that can improve communications (for erroneous data packets) in current wireless cellular networks. However, current implementations of HARQ do not take UE grouping into account and do not efficiently exploit D2D UE cooperation capabilities. Therefore, there is a need for efficient schemes that leverage UE cooperation and D2D communications with the HARQ mechanism.